Performative verbs (was: Re: here is some stuff i want all of ya'll to look at)

En réponse à Amanda Babcock :


>Well, one thing that I noticed is that you don't have a separate
>marker for performative statements.  That is, statements that by
>being uttered change a person's status, such as "I hereby declare
>you man and wife" or "I declare this convention open" or the like.
>
>At first glance this might seem to be just a normal statement, but
>really in its effect it is just as different from a statement as
>commands are.  When the judge (in some theoretical judge-based
>legal system) says "I hereby find you guilty", that's an entirely
>different event from the onlooker who then turns to his companion
>and says "The judge finds him guilty!"
Ah... performatives...

I find them so neat that I've decided that in Maggel verbs will always have 
two main forms, more fundamental than anything else (like the 
perfective-imperfective distinction is fundamental in Russian), and that's 
the performative-non-performative distinction. And to make things nicer, 
the performative forms will be easier to conjugate than the 
non-performative ones ;))) . I still have to find out what exactly the 
performative of verbs like "run", "sleep" and "die" can mean, but I'll find 
out ;) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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